Mountain View, California — Google is best-known for introducing a plethora of nifty little features through Labs that make the email platform more attractive and easy to use. Well, yesterday, Google announced that six new features has been culled from the experimental Labs and will become standard features of Gmail for everyone, while five will retire for good. The decisions were made based on usage and user feedback.
Google software engineer Mark Knichel explained in a blog post that the firm’s Gmail Labs, where new features are tried out, initially, had around 13 features but with time, the number actually grew to around 60 amazing Gmail Lab features that can be enabled or disable and is steadily adding more enhancements.
“Today, true to the original goal of Gmail Labs, we are graduating six more features and retiring five. These decisions were made based mainly on usage, taking feature polish and your feedback into account,” he wrote.
Analyze the list below to see which of the most liked features are graduating and which ones are flunked out:
Graduating:
Search Autocomplete: A pretty nifty feature introduced by Google, as soon as the user begins typing in the Gmail search box users will be able to see suggestions just as you do when searching on Google.com. Gmail auto suggestions will include contact names, labels, and advanced search operators like “from:” and “to:”.
Go To Label: If you want to search for a specific label simply type “gl” and the “label:” search operator will pop-up in your Gmail search box. To use this feature you must have keyboard shortcuts enabled, and your cursor cannot be in the search box when you type the keyboard shortcut ‘gl’.
Forgotten Attachment Detector: Sometimes we do forget that we had to attach some file in an email. Once you compose an email, this feature alerts you when you have forgotten to include an attachment, by analyzing your e-mail messages for words like “attached” and “included”.
YouTube Previews: When you receive a YouTube link via e-mail, this feature will give you the YouTube preview righ inside Gmail. You do not have to open a the link in the new window to view the video.
Custom Label Colors: Allows you to produce Color code of your own choice for easier organization. Google says you can select from more than 4000 color combinations to distinguish each label. You are supposed to be able to do this by clicking on “add custom colors” from the regular label interface, but at the time of this writing this feature was not available for me.
Vacation Dates: This is another great features introduced by Gmail. If you are on your vacation, this feature allows you to specify which dates you will be away on vacation in advance. To activate Vacation Responder click on “Settings” in the upper right hand corner of your inbox and then click on the “General” tab. Once activated, the Automatic Vacation Responder will reply to your incoming emails with the message you set and send them to different recipients.
Dumped:
Muzzle: Hides friends chat status messages to conserve screen real estate. Not everyone is happy with Google’s decision to dump Muzzle. Users have started an online petition to bring back Muzzle and even created a Gmail Muzzle Twitter account to help get the word out.
Fixed Width Font: Allows you to view messages in a fixed width font. Firefox users can still use this feature by adding this Greasemonkey script or you can try out this CSS hack.
Email Addict: Shuts down your Gmail for 15 minutes, forcing users to take a break from email. As the name suggests, this was a great feature for more undisciplined Gmail users. Firefox users can try out PageAddict as an alternative.
Location in Signature: Allows you to choose to include your location in your signature, using geographical data associated with your public IP address, but Gmail has cut a tool that automatically displayed your location as part of your Gmail signature.
Random Signature: Rotates among random quotes for your signature. Windows users can experiment with a program called Quotes that puts random quotes at the end of your signature using an e-mail client or Webmail. The catch is, you have to create your own quotes list, so check out this list of quotes from Wisestamp to help get you started.
Anyway, Google will probably roll out more interesting Gmail Labs features to replace all of this stuff before long.